Finding how to set up a proxy server is important if you ever want to become a power user. In simple terms, proxy usually means acting as a substitute or an agent. When it comes to the internet, this means using a program that acts like another or otherwise substitutes for it. In computing a proxy server is simply an informational middleman, if you will; it handles exchanges between the requester and the ultimate server. Anything and everything needed has to go through the proxy; no exceptions. What the proxy does is screen all requests against its set of filters, rules by which it can deny requests. Perhaps the most common such rule is banning access by clients on certain IP addresses.
When you want to set up a proxy server, you should research all available options carefully. One of the most popular proxy servers for Windows-based systems is WinProxy. People really like it because everything’s absolutely invisible to the requester, with nothing to install on the client computer. WinProxy is a transparent proxy server, which means that it also provides NAT (Network Address Translation). That means that the client side doesn’t even know it’s dealing with a proxy server in the first place. Apart from caching and the usual security features like filtering, WinProxy supports important protocols like HTTP, FTP, Telnet, Secure Sockets and DNS.
Getting it going is fairly simple and quick to do. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better alternative to set up a proxy server. Just make sure to take common initial steps such as installing TCP/IP on your network. Then, install WinProxy on the system, which you want to act as the proxy server. Which, by the way, is available on-demand as a file download. Now once you fire up WinProxy for the first time, you should use the included setup wizard for ease and peace of mind. Like most such wizards, you’ll be prompted for your produce license serial number right away. Further screens will ascertain the kind of connection you have to access the internet, dial-up or broadband. Sometimes you’ll have to tell the program yourself. Then comes the login info – namely, username and password. WinProxy then configures the internal and external IP addresses for the network. Now perhaps the best thing of all is how it will make an internal LAN address into an anonymous IP address. It uses what your ISP gave you and turns that into an external address. This external address is what someone else will see when his system requests something from yours. By now you would be practically at the end of setup, ready to take on the worldwide web anonymously through your proxy server, courtesy WinProxy.